This page provides online resources
to assist users in carrying out web-based research on Indonesia and East Timor. Suggestions for additional links are always
welcome!
Edited by Elizabeth Coville (ecoville@gmail.com)
What's Up on the Web:
A fortnightly update on
items of special interest to researchers on Indonesia and East Timor and
accessible through links on this page.
#2 - Search Inside
One warm day, I was
searching for a passage from This Earth of Mankind. Living in New Delhi,
but having no academic affiliation, I had no access to a local library.
None of the many English-language bookshops in Delhi seemed to carry the book.
My own marked up copy was thousands of miles away. In short, I was on my
own, with access to the internet as my only resource.
Fortunately, although I could not remember the chapter or page number, I did
remember a few words, specifically the words "not my world." Recalling the
controversy over Google's search of the contents of books, I thought I might be
able to search the entire text of the book by way of
Google Book Search. But, no luck --
only three of Pram's books were (partially) searchable and not This Earth.
So, I went to Amazon. I
dislike the way they are forever trying to sell me things, but I signed in
anyway, then searched for Pramoedya and This Earth. Success was within
sight, the key being "Search Inside! TM" and an arrow pointing to the image of
the book. It means what it says: there is a lot of information you
can search for ? Capitalized Phrases (CAP), Statistically Improbable Phrases
(SIP). Click on 'more' and you are taken to Books on Related Subjects (on
the basis of instances of the CAPs and SIPs), a Concordance, and even Text
Stats.
To accomplish the task at hand without getting unduly side-tracked, you need to
take two steps: first, you go to the box that says "search inside this
book" and type in the words 'not my world.' Of course this calls up too
many references, but nonetheless they are revealing, since they show you how,
where, and when Pramoedya used the word 'world', something that obviously would
take ages by hand. And, since This Earth is a text you are familiar with,
and since the references are in chronological order, a quick scan brings you to
the one you want.
The next problem is that the passage is too truncated with too many ellipses to
be much use. So then you click on 'on page 111' in front of the passage,
and you see the entire page from which the citation is taken. By clicking
on arrows that say 'previous page' and 'next page', presumably you could read
the whole book. More to the point, you can see what came on the pages just
before and just after the passage in question. (What you can't do,
however, is copy or print. So to record my passage, I wrote it out in long
hand.)
I'm still looking forward to getting home to my own copy of This Earth, old and
falling-apart, its binding held together with duct tape. But I discovered
that if you find yourself stranded and bookless, the web comes to the rescue.
I had planned just to locate the passage and check the exact wording, and I
learned that I could do that quickly and easily. Plus, I discovered a new
way to revisit an old text -- a kind of middle path between rereading the old
marked-up copy and reading a clean copy from scratch.
(Although this was mostly written before the death of Pak Pram, let it be
a humble tribute the man and his work.)
Posted May 12, 2006
@ 2000 Antara Kita. Southeast Asian Studies
Program, Yamada House, Ohio University, Athens, OH
45701-2979, USA.
This site was last updated on
May
12, 2006